It was the best outfit she had. The waxed linen and sheepskin tunic, jerkin, and trousers were dyed honey and mulberry, autumn colors, but in a town as fine as Bree, where fashion had more to do with whim than weather, maybe no one would notice. She hoped the finely-stitched, if faded garments would mark her as less of an outsider than the medley of leather, maille, and roughhewn cloth she otherwise wore. The grey spun hood and scarf were packed away, and the silver seven-pointed star she wore proudly outside the walls was instead pinned inside her tunic, close and hidden.
She held her breath as she entered the Pony, expecting a guard’s retinue ready to arrest her or else a fanfare of trumpets welcoming her home, each its own sort of nightmare. Instead there was hearth-smoke, ale-chatter, and the mutterings of a gaggle of country gentlefolk at a table barely out of sight.
Haneth shuffled to the counter. She gave the barkeep a half-smile, half-afraid he'd recognize her, but he seemed too busy or else it had been too long.
“What'll it be, lass?” he asked, dutifully drying a mug with one of a few dozen cloths he had laundered daily for such a task.
"A Best, of course,” she answered with a soft smile. Her own voice sounded strange to her, as it always did, coming in from the wild. Hoarse, like a rusted weapon poorly kept.
She watched him reach for a pewter mug when she remembered the weight on her hip.
"Wait..." The woman unhooked an old, beaten, wooden mug from a buckled strap on her supply belt and set it on the counter. It was too large for a traditional travel mug. Turning it in the light revealed the old, smoothed, faded insignia of the Prancing Pony, once freshly etched into its flank.
"You still take these, I hope?" she asked, fingers gently resting on its handle.
The middle-aged barman squinted to make out the worn stamp of his own tavern on the mug. His bushy, soot-grey brows climbed before a smile breached his wrinkles. “Aye...aye we still do. My…let me see that.” Haneth faithfully handed the mug over to his inspection.
She’d never seen an Elf or Dwarf look on such a trinket, gold, silver, or better, with the type of wonder in the older barman’s eyes. It was like a lost pet returned to him, or finding a family heirloom long thought lost, only for it to have been lying in wait in the bottom of an inherited wedding trunk for all those long years.
“This is an antique, almost,” he said, thumbing the etching as if he could wipe away the marks left by a lifetime of use. “Old Kempe used to make these before he died. Haven’t had enough reason to find someone else to do so. New mugs are just stamped with the brand, but this…” He shook his head, laughter deep, almost buried in his belly.
“On the house,” he said as he turned to fill the vessel up to the brim, but not before glancing at the name marked on the bottom. When he handed it to her, she was surprised he didn’t at first take his hand away. She didn’t know if she’d ever met the barman’s eyes. As a young woman, she never saw it fit to meet many, but she met his now.
“Thank you, Haneth…” His naming her startled her before she realized he’d read it on the bottom of her mug. She hadn’t recovered before he turned back to his work, shaking his head and muttering, chuckling to himself and the memories the memento returned.
By now the country gentlemen had retired to separate rooms or to each other’s, she paid no mind. The tavern room was empty but for herself, the snoring of the tavern cat, and Barliman’s calm muttering. Haneth sat at a table, its surfaced smoothed by years of sleeves pressed against it, folk leaning in to hear a story or else raise a drink or wave a fist. She took a sip of the Best and savored it. Water freshly boiled was too hot, spring water too cold, but Barliman’s Best was like a warm bath, a reassuring neutral, to fill whatever empty space you needed it.
She set the mug down and looked at it. It had been her constant companion, kept closer to her than her bow, sword, or saex. She’d buried it on missions from which she’d thought she’d never return, only to retrieve it again weeks, sometimes months later, waiting for her in its cocoon of treated hide. Travel and time had worn it nearly as smooth as the table, but she could still trace her finger along the familiar outline and remember when the rampant prancing pony’s lines were firm and defined.
She settled in for a long, peaceful night of crackling coal, murmurs and laughter, and the wind’s gentle tapping at the windows—reminders that even in drought, storms, blizzards, and flood were just around the corner. Weather never tired of disaster, after all.
❖
Hours passed, and she let them. A few patrons came and went. She knew not whether they were regulars or guests, locals or road-folk. She barely paid attention but for a moment’s glance, never hopeful for recognition but wondering when in the millions of faces in all the earth’s currents would she find one she knew. Instead she set her mind to wandering.
She was lucky. Anyone still alive was. She’d witnessed the summer’s hunger, nowhere more vividly than in her passing through Dunland, where their cattle were so thin their ribs looked like letters stamped into a leather book. Even in Bree-land the fields were dusty from lack of rain. But in the Pony, you would never know it. The firewood was stocked, barrels and patrons alike swollen and fat, and the scent of pork drippings carried down from the kitchen hall.
Had it been twenty years, and nothing had changed? Some things had. The Justice from her early days in Bree turned out not to be immortal after all. The stoic youth she had learned to fear as well as trust had retired, or died, or moved away. The crooks had laid down their spears and become better dressed, dealing in the currency of lies instead of bloodshed. Even the street urchins seemed calm, if hungry—braying, neglected lambs instead of the scavenging rats they once were.
Would she visit the old homesteads where the halls and manors were? She did not know if she could bear to see them empty and decayed, or worse—well-kept and lived in by newer masters.
Her mug now was nearly empty. She nursed the last quarter of it in rationed sips, unsure if possession of it earned her a second helping. Irrationally, she feared once she had finished with this portion, she would have to give it up. Her constant. Her companion.
She couldn’t remember the day he had given it to her. After so much time, those days blended together. She’d accused him of stealing it, she remembered, but she learned after that there was a select few of regulars, each with his own mug, his name fire-etched into its bottom, which awarded him a Barliman’s Best for pennies to the silver. She had been too poor, too rural in her youth, too infrequent a visitor to town and never a drinker, to know it. Now she knew it was a select club, apparently derelict since the barman’s woodworker friend had died. Maybe Old Kempe’s death was more of an excuse than a reason, but whatever the cause, these mugs were rare in the tavern. Without knowing it, she’d been carrying a Bree-town treasure ever since riding out its South Gate and never looking back.
She’d thought at the time he’d given it to her as a joke, or else a memento from the land in which they’d met. But she knew now what it really meant. For the Ranger who never ventured past the hedge girdling the city, in his fifty years wandering Bree-land’s gentle wilds, to venture to the Pony on such an errand meant one thing: that he would go anywhere for her.
She looked down at the straw scattered across the stone floor to catch patrons’ careless spillage. It wasn’t right to pour out some of her drink to his memory. Agamaran wasn’t dead, after all. She knew; she’d seen him. Once in twenty years, far away in her homeland. Where was he now, and did he still follow her from afar, keep up on her movements across the continent and back again? Had he ever since returned to Bree?
Wherever he was, he’d been in each reminder, the silver pin that now scratched against her skin as she wore it on the inside of her jerkin and in the weight of a wooden mug on her hip, a better heirloom than any gold, garnet, or silver.
“Here’s to you, beloved,” she muttered, tapped the mug on the table, and threw back the last rationed sip.
